HTML advice

There is more to creating a web page than knowing HTML. A page must be interesting and attractive and correct. It is often the first exposure of a reader to the person or the company presenting the page. It is the essense of the first impression.
      Customers are not only taking their time to read it as with any brochure but they are also paying for connect time with a service provider. They want to find what they are looking for without any extra hassles of reading through overly long screens or waiting for graphics to download that add nothing to the reason they logged on to your web site.
      For example, a beautiful woman certainly can get a person's attention, but a picture of your product is better and best of all a picture of a beautiful woman holding your product. A company logo should be used as it is the image of your company. A pictures of your sales personnel build a familiarity with the customer before meeting and takes away some of that "cold call" feeling.
      While computer art is here to stay, it is only a tool in the hands of a designer. If you have had professional brochures made up, by all means have the artwork scanned in so it can be transmitted as a web image. The company who made it may already have it in computer form. If you do not have the original artwork, the brochure can usually be scanned to create GIFs for transmission on the web.
      Check your contract with the company to make certain you bought the full rights to use the material in any form.
      When creating a set of web pages, think about it, use it, think about it, use it, repeat as many times as possible. First off, if your objective is other than to sell the product a vanity page is cheaper. Certainly you want the customer to have confidence in you and your company but do you want him to have to wade through pages of telling him how great you are before you tell him what you are selling?
      When you get a catalog in the mail from an unknown company, do you research the company before you look at the merchandise? It is when you find just what you want at a price too good to pass up that you begin to care about the company. So put your product right up front. A good product will bring name recognition.
      For example, I am selling my ability to create functional web pages that will be interesting, get attention, and make people want my service over others. Consider also this is my first attempt to sell myself in this field. Were I long in the business I would have a set of references that you could click on that would connect you to the web sites I maintain so you could see for yourself.
      You are looking at my product so I demonstrate it. As you go through it you will see graphics modified or created for this project. As I do not have a picture of a beautiful woman holding one of my web pages, I introduce humor. I give you a feeling for me by showing one of my worst personality traits, I am NEVER humble," but show I know it and that I temper it with humor. You have gotten to know me.
      I give some of my background that is related to selling myself to help you sell yourself and your product. For example I show a range of business experience, from delievering pizza to corporate executive. That means, I don't know your business but I can learn anything about it you need to teach me to create your web site.
      I can not show credentials in graphic arts nor would telling you of my many hours creating graphics impress you, so I show you what I can create. This part of my product.
      I have added links to my articles to other parts of the document. For you this might be a widget page saying "our widget works perfectly with our WODGET" and clicking on WODGET would tell you about the wodget.
      Of course once they read about your products they will want to order. This is where the order form are used. You can see this on the mock FBI home page by filling in the form to turn yourself in as a software pirate. Were is a product order form it would be sent as mail from the customer to you and appear in your account from any place in the world in seconds.
      You will note that you can get quite far down in the tree structure of the pages and using the "back" button on your browser can be annoying. Much more so if your customer is reconnecting six different times to get back where he wants to be. Thus you will note the strategic placement of "return to home page" selections throughout the pages.
      One of the issues is that although HTML can specify the general way a page will look, the exact way it will look depends upon the browser used. There are three levels of HTML that can jokingly be called standards, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Different browsers meet varying degrees of compliance with these standards. And then there is NETSCAPE which is playing the "we are the standard" game introducing "NETSCAPEisms" that only it displays as the author intended.
      Were matters not bad enough with browsers, graphics are another problem. As you know graphics have a specific resolution as sent. But the size of them as displayed depends upon the Windows (or other) resolution of the machine displaying them. The higher resolution the small the picture.
      What this implies is that the graphics resolution needs be set for the lowest resolution screen, meaning that the GIF file needs to be larger requiring more transmit time. If this is not clear, consider the extreme case of an icon on the screen and that same icon expanded in an icon editor display.
      As it is impractical to switch screen resolutions to test graphics clearly it is desirable not only to have different browsers but also different browsers on another computer set to a different Windows resolution. This of course mitigates in favor of having a team of people involved if for nothing else than quality assurance.
      Another complication is user preferences over which there is no control. The font type and size used by the user for each header level and for the default text is up to the user to select as defaults. Generally one can expect descending size in ascending order but as to the looks of the font, sorry. It is coming but then so is everything in HTML.
      This is up to the user but it also reflects upon the "looks" of the page.